Mountain Top Removal

Dakstang

WC's Resident Redneck

There is a process of mining for coal called Mountain Top Removal. This is a pretty new way of mining for coal. Here is a description from wikipedia of what they do:

In mountaintop removal mining, the targeted land is clear-cut of all trees, which are usually sold to timber companies.[3] The topsoil is removed and set aside for later reclamation.[3] Miners then use explosives to blast away the land, overburden (the rock and subsoil that lies above a coal seam), exposing the coal. The overburden is pushed into a nearby valley or hollow, creating a pile below called valley fill. A dragline excavator removes the coal, and it is transported to a processing plant and washed. Millions of gallons of waste from coal processing, called sludge or slurry, is often stored nearby in open pools held back by earthen dams. Upon completion of coal removal from a mountain, the mining operator replaces soil on the stripped site and seeds it for revegetation.

Because coal usually exists in multiple seams separated by rock, miners can repeat the blasting process to mine over a dozen seams on a single mountain, lowering the mountain's height each time, sometimes hundreds of feet.[3] Kentucky and West Virginia, the two leading coal-producing states in Appalachia, each use about 1000 metric tons of explosives per day for surface mining.[4]

The EPA estimates that 2,200 square miles of Appalachian forests will be mined using mountaintop removal by 2012

So my question is, what is your view on this? Is it bad for the environment? Should they be allowed to do this?

Necro

First off I thought that had to do with breast reduction. Thank God the topic title wasn't a play on words.

Now on to your subject. Seems horrible for the environment, but at the same time you never want to see coal workers dieing getting trapped underground...